ABSTRACT
Against the postmillennial moment characterized by unholy linkages between globalization, hegemonic masculinity, and religious nationalism in contemporary India, Chapter 4 broadly examines the discourses and events around menstrual activisms, with particular focus on the Sabarimala verdict (2018). It examines the multifarious, non-coalescent publics mobilized by the Sabarimala verdict – among them secular publics, religious publics, moral publics, left ideological publics, and feminist counterpublics – as they facilitate the performance of contesting gendered subjectivities ranging from the believer to the activist. Against a broader display of panic and violence by the moral majority, these activisms reclaim bleeding bodies immured in scripts of pollution, impurity, and shame into an embodied politics of resistance. In theorizing these activisms, the chapter foregrounds a notion of menarchy – an anarchy made possible by nomadic communication flows and networks that take women’s intimate personal experiences and tabooed body narratives to a new embedded/embodied politics of emotions – one that creates leaks and holes in internalized cultures of shame. As the debates around menstruation set forth affective economies of digitality, women’s leaky bodies thus assume subversive potentialities within it, enabling new digital scripting of selves and “little” storytellings.
